Comment by ABS

Comment by ABS 2 days ago

24 replies

View on Hacker News

money quote:

  "if Microsoft’s claim stands, then topological qubits have finally reached some sort of parity with where more traditional qubits were 20-30 years ago. I.e., the non-topological approaches like superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom have an absolutely massive head start: there, Google, IBM, Quantinuum, QuEra, and other companies now routinely do experiments with dozens or even hundreds of entangled qubits, and thousands of two-qubit gates. Topological qubits can win if, and only if, they turn out to be so much more reliable that they leapfrog the earlier approaches—sort of like the transistor did to the vacuum tube and electromechanical relay. Whether that will happen is still an open question, to put it extremely mildly."
tromp 2 days ago

The quote that struck me was

> I foresee exciting times ahead, provided we still have a functioning civilization in which to enjoy them.

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  • gauge_field 2 days ago

    If you are shocked by this, I suggest not reading his other recent topics.

    Reply View 10 replies
    • moshun 2 days ago

      Spent an hour going through his blog. Wild and unpleasant ride.

      Reply View 6 replies
      • HappyPanacea a day ago

        I found his blog to be candid and well thought out usually

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      • tdb7893 2 days ago

        It's interesting to see someone who seems to describe themself as anti-woke try desperately to convince the generally anti-academic movement to fund academics. Sadly I don't think he'll succeed in this.

        I don't agree with many of his posts but I think the blog is interesting in how personal it feels. Often I feel like all media is very cultivated but he seems very willing to put his own anxieties and foibles on the web.

        Reply View 2 replies
      • darknavi 2 days ago

        The comments section of that blog is truly a wild ride.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • fc417fc802 a day ago

          As it should be.

          > For most of my professional life, this blog has been my forum, where anyone in the world could show up to raise any issue they wanted, as if we were tunic-wearing philosophers in the Athenian agora.

          https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6576

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    • echelon 2 days ago

      > If you are shocked by this, I suggest not reading his other recent topics.

      Given that this is Scott Aaronson, does he suggest we'll break cryptography and destroy the foundations of the modern internet?

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  • [removed] 2 days ago
    [deleted]
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fauigerzigerk 2 days ago

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the first and the second sentence (to my completely uneducated mind).

If topological qubits turn out to be so much more reliable then it doesn't really matter how much time was spent trying to make other types of qubits more reliable. It's not really a head start, is it?

Or are there other problems besides preventing unwanted decoherence that might take that much time to solve?

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  • tsimionescu 2 days ago

    The point I think is this: if topological qubits are similar to other types of qubits, then investing in them is going to be disappointing because the other approaches have so much more work put into them.

    So, he is saying that this approach will only pay off if topological qubits are a fundamentally better approach than the others being tried. If they turn out to be, say, merely twice as good as trapped ion qubits, they'll still only get to the achievements of current trapped ion designs with another, say, 10-15 years of continued investment.

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    • adastra22 2 days ago

      The whole point though is that they are step function better than traditional qubits, in a way that is simply a type error to compare.

      The utility of traditional qubits depends entirely on how reliable and long-lived they are, and how to can scale to larger numbers of qubits. These topological qubits are effectively 100% reliable, infinite duration, and scale like semiconductors. According to the marketing literature, at least…

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      • radioactivist 2 days ago

        There are caveats there too. Generally topological qubits can be immune to all kinds of noise (i.e. built-in error correction) but Majorana zero modes aren't exact the right kind of topological for that to be true. They only enjoy protection on most operations, but not all. So there is a still a need for error correction here (and all the complication that entails) it is just hopefully less onerous since only essentially one operation requires it.

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      • pclmulqdq 2 days ago

        All the other qubits scaled the same way when they were in a simulator, too. When they actually hit reality, they all had huge problems.

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nprateem 2 days ago

Yeah I mean that's exactly what MS are talking about, only requiring 1/20 of the checksum qubits or something.

https://www.ft.com/content/a60f44f5-81ca-4e66-8193-64c956b09...

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  • ABS 2 days ago

    what Microsoft claim in their marketing copy reported by the FT - for the average reader - and what a third-party, well-known expert in the field thinks... are on very different levels AFAIC

    Microsoft is saying: we did it!

    Everyone else is saying: prove it!

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    • nprateem 2 days ago

      Yes, that's why we read decent journalism that includes the opinions of experts. MS are still saying production use is pretty far off.

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      • ABS 2 days ago

        except we don't need opinions, we need proof and that is what we are lacking.

        The only expert in the FT article is Dr. Sankar Das Sarma who (from Wikipedia)

          "In collaboration with Chetan Nayak and Michael Freedman of Microsoft Research, Das Sarma introduced the ν = 5 / 2 topological qubit in 2005"
        So you might understand why this FT article is not adding anything to the discussion, which does not discuss the theory but rather MS's claim of an actual breakthrough.

        They show a chip, we'd like proof of what the chip actually does

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